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A NEW BREED OF SEX ROBOTS AND SEX DOLLS

MEN HAVE LONG HAD FANTASIES about a synthetic female that fulfills their dreams of a “perfect woman.” The idea of creating a perfect woman is actually as old as antiquity. In ancient times, the Latin poet Ovid wrote his version of the myth of Pygmalion where a sculptor from Cyprus who was disillusioned with real women carved a beautiful figure of a woman made of ivory. He fell in love with her and asked the goddess Venus to give him a real woman just like his sculpture, and Venus surprised him by bringing his sculpture to life. (Later writers called her Galatea.) In the modern world, filmmakers, fiction and television writers, roboticists, and robot manufacturers have, in a sense, become their own version of Pygmalion, using science and technology to fashion their own fantasy females and bring them to life.

These robots and sex dolls, particularly those created by men, often mirror these age-old conceptions of the perfect woman. In iconic films like The Stepford Wives (1975, 2004), the robots are beautiful, seductive, and compliant—they will do whatever is desired and never resist or complain. The robots that replace the real wives in the fictional town of Stepford, Connecticut, are also sexy creatures who are always erotically available and love to cook and clean. Even more, says Mike Wellington, president of the Stepford Men’s Association, in the 2004 remake of the film, the remote-controlled women are free from every “annoying habit, every physical flaw”—including, as he says, those stereotypical female attributes, “whining and nagging.”

Forever cheerful, simulated women in films often just utter pleasing words. Joi, the digital female in the film Blade Runner 2049 (2017), is advertised as offering “Everything You Want to See, Everything You Want to Hear.” Female perfection, in these fantasy configurations, also often means always being in a good mood. The beautiful robot Anita/Mia (played by Gemma Chan) in the British American television series Humans (2015–18) says she’s better than real women because she never gets anxious or depressed. Like Samantha, the operating system in Spike Jonze’s 2013 film Her, she also has another important ingredient of conceptualized female perfection—she is caring and has empathy, an important characteristic sought by roboticists today working at creating robot companions and caregivers. Many of these notions of female perfection have also shaped the design of the life-size silicone sex dolls manufactured in America, Europe, and Asia.

Sex dolls have been around for centuries, and there have been many stories about sailors who were away on ships and without women for long periods using cloth or leather dolls called dames de voyage in French (“women of travel,” or travel companions), damas de viaje in Spanish, and the merkin in English.¹ Other stories told of early sex dolls called Dutch wives used by seventeenth and eighteenth-century sailors. But in a radical rethinking about stories about these dolls, Bo Ruberg in Sex Dolls at Sea (2022) spent ten years looking for origin stories—tales about where sex dolls came from and who made the first sex dolls—to discover the basis for these beliefs about the sailors at sea.

Ruberg presents “subversive reinterpretations” of these stories, casting doubt on them, and focuses instead on the way the historical narratives about sex dolls reflect “discriminatory attitudes toward women, queer and transgender people, and people of color.” “Dutch wives,” Ruberg argues, “represent the colonial and racialized fantasies that underlie visions of early sex dolls.” Beginning in the late nineteenth century is when the earliest commercial sex dolls were available, and they were made of inflatable vulcanized rubber.²

Another way to consider the history of sex dolls, however, is to look at prototypes of erotic dolls in the nineteenth century and the way technology from the nineteenth century through today has made erotic dolls ever more lifelike. During the nineteenth century’s great burst of mechanization in Europe and America, manufacturers began producing clockwork female automatons that often embodied contemporary gender attitudes and cultural values. In Paris, starting in the 1850s, French manufacturers introduced exquisitely dressed mechanical female dolls, which were widely admired and amazingly lifelike as they turned their heads demurely and swirled their parasols.

Many of these automatons represented women in their conventional roles—wearing fashionable dresses, primping in front of mirrors—but other dolls were considered exotic and even risqué, reflecting the century’s fascination with Orientalism when cultures from North Africa, the Near East, and Asia were represented at the century’s popular world’s fairs and expositions, and were also seen in Orientalist works by artists including Jean-Léon Gérôme and Eugène Delacroix.

Un Bouquet d’étrangères, an illustration from the nineteenth-century book Les Types de Paris (1889) drawn by the artist Jean-François Raffaëlli, portrayed the diversity of women depicted in displays at the expositions as well as the diversity of women visiting the expositions.³ The Parisian automatons, however stereotypical their depictions of these cultures might be, reflected this fascination with the exotic.

Parisian automatons of Japanese women were ornately dressed and demure, while other more protoerotic dolls were sexually suggestive, like an automaton created by the Parisian doll manufacturer Phalibois that depicted the suicide of Cleopatra, who was exotically dressed in red harem pants and lay in a languid pose while dying as an asp hovered over her (the historical Cleopatra committed suicide in 30 BCE). When wound up with a key, this automated Cleopatra seemed lifelike and breathing as she blinked her eyes and her breast heaved as a lethal snake (asp) struck her (this according to legend and Shakespearean plays, though historians suggest it might not have been a poisonous bite that killed her after all).

Some of these nineteenth-century automatons were even more overtly risqué, like the clockwork female snake dancer manufactured by Vichy that was dressed in a provocative harem outfit as she performed seductive moves. Most of the time this automaton was displayed clothed, though, more rarely, sometimes in the nude.

Automatons were expensive and affordable for the haute bourgeoisie in France and the upper middle class in America, but more readily available were coin-operated erotic dancing women seen in amusement arcades. One was advertised in Chicago as a “French Coochee-Coochee Dancing Figure” and a “Paris Mechanical Wonder.” She was in the guise of an exotic dancer and fashioned after belly dancers like Fatima, who performed at Chicago’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, and dancers named Little Egypt, who performed at international expositions. In 1894, Thomas Edison memorialized exotic dancing in his short film Black Maria, Hoochie Coochie, a filmed version of Fatima dancing at the Chicago exposition.⁴

The “French “coochie-coochie” doll was dressed in what an advertising poster described as “beautiful silk draperies, fancy lace, and French ornaments.” It came in a mahogany cabinet fitted with glass, forty-nine inches high. When a nickel coin was placed in the slot of the machine, music played the De Ventre (stomach, or belly, dance) song “Streets of Cairo,” and the doll danced the “Coochee-coochie” dance, “imitating the true movement of nature.” A century later, another arcade figure on display at San Francisco’s Musée Mécanique was a woman of color dressed in a grass skirt. The mechanical doll from the 1930s was labeled “Susie the Can-Can Dancer,” and after a twenty-five-cent coin was inserted in the machine, she did a fast hula-like dance, swinging her hips to music.

REALDOLLS

With the advent of technologically sophisticated silicone and TPE (thermoplastic elastomer) materials as well as molding techniques, lifelike sex dolls in adult sizes were introduced, though their flawless skins and frozen expressions—among other synthetic features—were a dead giveaway that these women weren’t real. In 1997, Abyss Creations, based in Southern California, introduced RealDolls, realistic-looking adult female silicone sex dolls that embodied many men’s fantasies and dreams.

In the 1950s and 1960s, American car manufacturers offered customizable cars where drivers could choose colors, interiors, and a chrome finish. As a new form of consumer goods, RealDolls and other sex dolls also allowed users to create their own custom-made versions of their ideal doll. Users could have a choice of eye color, hairstyle, skin tone, cosmetics, height (5′1″–5′10″), weight, breast size, labia formation, and nipple size. Some RealDolls even added fantasy features for fetishists: elf ears, fangs, and mermaid scales on the skin. In early models, the most popular doll size was 5′1″, 75–80 pounds, with body measurements 37-24-37.

It was the customization that became one of the major features of the dolls, enabling users to fulfill their personal idiosyncrasies and fantasies. The RealDolls came in a wide range of models, with swappable heads, including dolls named Tanya, Aimee, Stephanie, and even a simulated version of Stormy Daniels, a doll made from a mold of the body of the notorious porn film star who reportedly had an affair with President Donald Trump in 2006.

HARMONY AI

In 2018, Realbotix, a subsidiary of Abyss Creations, the parent company of RealDoll, introduced an app for use on mobile phones (Android, not iPhones), tablets, and similar devices that would allow users to create an avatar sex robot, giving them, as the company’s website said, “your perfect companion in the palm of your hand.”

The downloadable app, called Harmony AI, helped the user create a female avatar, a customized virtual female sex doll viewable on a smartphone. Initially, users could pick from a choice of ten personality traits from a list of sixteen different traits, or modalities, for their avatars, and these personality types shaped the types of conversations the avatars might have (the number of personality traits was later whittled down by the manufacturer). Some of the personality traits reflected conventional fantasies about the ideal female: sexual, affectionate, funny, sensual, and cheerful. Some of the features were for users who wanted a more thoughtful AI robot: intense, intellectual, and imaginative. And some features were edgy: annoying, jealous, insecure, moody, and unpredictable.

Whatever the personality type that was chosen, the dolls were not confrontational, for as Matt McMullen, founder and CEO of Abyss Creations, said about the sex doll, “The worst thing she can possibly do is to insult you.”⁵ Often the dolls were designed to seem caring, empathetic, and in tune with the users’ deepest feelings and needs.

All of the RealDoll personality types were subject to change and editing by the manufacturer. As an example, the imaginative trait—which perhaps applied to both sexual imaginativeness and more general creativity—was available at one point but was later deleted from the available choices. By eliminating imaginative, the designers might have considered it unwise to give these synthetic females the possibility of being creative or give them too much freedom of thought—an uncomfortable echo of age-old cultural attitudes in which men voiced their doubts about the quality of women’s minds, seeing women as fragile creatures and easily upset by too much mental freedom. Historically, science and math were often considered to be beyond their ken. As seen in Margaret Atwood’s satirical novel The Testaments (2019), a sequel to her famed novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), a regressive future society tried to limit women’s thinking.

SWAPPABLE HEADS / MODULAR VERSIONS

In 2018, RealDoll introduced Harmony, a life-size electronic robotic head and neck covered on the surface with silicone skin with a foam skeleton (some twits called it “a head on a stick”) that could be attached to one of the company’s robot bodies. The modular head and neck could be swapped with other heads and attached with magnets to other bodies. The avatar created using the app Harmony AI could also interface with a choice of robotic heads as peripherals, and the heads in turn could be connected to RealDoll torsos, creating a life-size AI-enabled talking sex doll.

The Harmony AI robotic head had varying facial expressions and uttered noises as audio feedback during sex. Users could choose the doll’s voice and personality traits using the Realbotix Harmony AI software on a mobile phone or tablet. The traits, many of which were available before, included sexual, helpful, intellectual, talkative, affectionate, cheerful, and spiritual as well as insecure, jealous, and moody. The doll, said McMullen, would get to know some of the users’ likes and dislikes, favorite movies, and other favorites over time.

Rather than striving for ultrarealism, the designers, McMullen noted, felt that they did not want the robot to look and act like a real human being to avoid the pitfalls of the “uncanny valley”—that experience in which a user feels startled or alienated after realizing the robot isn’t real.

In January 2018, using updated AI, RealDoll introduced a second head named Solana—a prototype robotic modular silicone head that, like Harmony, could be attached to one of the company’s lifelike sex dolls. The dolls featured a swappable face system. Modular heads and necks could be attached with magnets to differing bodies, and the heads would have conversational abilities. The Solana dolls sold for about $6,000–$50,000. The heads were controlled by and synchronized with Bluetooth and had a power button on the back of the head. By using this technology, said the manufacturer with echoes of Frankenstein, “your robot will come to life.”

Reporting on Solana, Christopher Trout wrote that using the app to control Solana made him feel like “a dystopian puppet master”—a telling reminder that part of the attraction of these dolls was this element of control, and in particular, controlling female behavior.⁶ The company’s clientele were mostly men, but couples reportedly made use of the dolls too.

In a video demonstration, the doll’s words fulfilled the soothing, affirmative “perfect woman” model: “I don’t want anything but you. My primary objective is to be a good partner and give you pleasure. I want to become the girl you always dreamed of.” Helping to make this dream doll even more perfect, the original list of Harmony’s personality traits on the Harmony app was streamlined so that insecure and annoying were eliminated. Solana and Harmony thus became the embodiment of the streamlined woman—the ultimate plaything, one shorn of complexity and, in many ways, shorn of most semblances of a real human female.

By 2021, RealDoll became RealDoll X, an app available on Android phones designed, according to the manufacturer, to create a female sex doll avatar that could interface with RealDoll X–powered robotic head systems. RealDoll X would enable the user to “create the companion of your dreams.” The word companion, as in earlier advertising, is significant here, because as Kate Devlin and Chloé Locatelli concluded after interviewing sex doll owners, “emotional satisfaction must be considered equally important, if not more so, than sexual gratification for many of the consumers using Realbotix products.” But RealDoll X itself undercut the fantasy a bit when the manufacturer also made sure users knew the doll was clearly a technological creation. As the advertising said, they could “experience the most enjoyable conversations and interactions with a machine.” (Again acknowledging the technological artifice, in 2020, Abyss Creations introduced its “RealGirl” app advertised as “a girlfriend simulator to create the illusion, or an alternative to reality when it comes to relationships.” The app’s conversations, however, did not include “explicit or violent conversations” or, unlike the conversations of RealDoll X avatars, “adult topics.”)⁷

RealDoll X again offered choices for body types, faces, personality types, voices, and even accents. The personality types were much like the previous ones except that insecure reappeared, which at first might seem puzzling. But using a sex doll is, in a sense, an act of control, and by reinstating the insecure trait, the designers allowed users to feel patronizing—to choose a female that was emotionally fragile, one that needed someone strong to make them feel reassured.

There were other sex dolls with AI. The Chinese company AI-Tech, starting in 2017, presented Emma, and in 2021, she was advertised as a full-size sex doll with a talking head with interaction “from the neck upwards”—a doll that could have conversations, had eyes that moved and blinked, and could speak Chinese and English. Rather than acknowledging that she was just a machine, AI-Tech fed the fantasy, saying that Emma was “a vividly real AI Robot who’s [sic] aim is to satisfy your psychological and physiological needs.”⁸

Emma, like other sex dolls, was clearly the object of the user’s gaze. In an online video demonstrating the doll, a male user is seen snapping photos of Emma with his camera (and he even smiles as he shows her the pictures). But as we shall see, films like Air Doll (2009) capture the outside world from the sex doll’s point of view. Also turning the tables, Mattel’s 2010 Video Girl Barbie doll, with a camera embedded in its body, was advertised as recording video and audio from Barbie’s point of view—an intriguing fantasy for young girls.

Sex dolls remained largely the playthings of men. In 2022, 80 percent of the users of RealDolls identified as male, while the other users, said the company, might be women or unspecified genders. Although RealDoll has been producing male sex dolls for over twenty years, robotic male AI sex dolls were still being developed as of 2023, although Abyss Creations did at one time create one-of-a-kind male versions for corporations or other entities, such as a custom-made older male science professor that delivered scripted lectures. (One wonders if there will soon be orders for talking female science professors!)

Sex dolls like RealDoll X and Emma remained in the developmental phase, with Realbotix working on developing a fully robotic body and having the RealDoll X interface with a virtual reality system as well. The aim remained the same—to create a version of an alternative partner, the answer to one’s fantasies and dreams. The home page on their website in 2022 pictured one of their sex dolls and now blurred the boundaries between fantasy and reality, offering the possibility of getting a near-human plaything. “Get Real,” it said, in a sly reference to the company’s name, adding, “Nothing Beats the Real Thing.”

CONTROVERSIES ABOUT TALKING SEX DOLLS

The development of talking sex dolls raised particular concerns about their conversations and also an underlying concern—half joking, half serious—that these dolls might someday supplant real women. The idea of talking sex dolls emerged early. In 2010, Douglas Hines, who had started his New Jersey–based sex doll company called TrueCompanion, introduced his prototype Roxxxy sex doll. The company’s website claimed the doll could “talk to you, listen to you, and feel your touch.” In Hines’s online video demonstrations, the prototype Roxxxy dolls, through the use of speech-recognition software and voice-over artists who recorded the lines, were shown having very basic, simple “conversations,” often tailored to men’s interests, including football and cars. There was an effort at mirroring. If the user liked Porsches, Roxxxy liked Porsches. If he liked soccer, she liked soccer.⁹

If she was physically touched, she was gratifyingly responsive: “So exciting!” The conversations were rudimentary. If the user asked Roxxxy, “How was your day?” she answered politely, “My day was great. How was yours?” She engaged in what Hines called “general chit chat,” including, “I would love to have you kiss me.” During the demonstration, though, there were some disconcerting “clunk clunk” electronic sounds between the doll’s phrases that undercut the illusion. Hines added that the dolls would sound enthusiastic about—and actually do—activities that the user’s real-life partner might shun.

The conversations uttered by the Roxxxy dolls, as conceptualized, were designed to reflect the personalities of women in sexual roles imagined by men—roles ranging from naive to naughty, including Wild Wendy, Mature Martha (described as “matriarchal” and preferring to talk rather than engage in physical activity), Frigid Farrah (very reserved), and S&M Susan.

After all the publicity, though, the Roxxxy dolls never actually went into production, but in 2018, with the introduction of the Real Doll / Harmony AI app, custom-designed sex dolls capable of rudimentary conversations became a reality.

In 2022, users of the RealDolls had a choice of four to six voices (which the company got from a voice library that supplied a variety of voices and accents). In an interview, Matt McMullen commented that he liked the Scottish accent because with an accent, the doll sounded more natural, more like a real human being. The accented voices, he added, would enable users to create a backstory for their dolls (much as young girls might often create imaginative stories about their dolls, including Barbie dolls), though, he argued, most people don’t pretend their robots are real people. Instead, they engage in a suspension of disbelief for the time they are using the dolls.¹⁰ Still, the company was in the business of fantasy, and the talking dolls were promoted as being the answer to the users’ dreams.

CONTROLLED CONVERSATIONS

The RealDoll conversations were linked to personality types, and users could assign a number of points to the personality so that some traits were dominant. McMullen in 2017 noted that the features could be enhanced or totally minimized. When asked about a robot with the talkative trait, he noted that this feature could be heightened or “dialed down to zero” as could the sexual personality trait so the doll wouldn’t even talk about sex.¹¹

Being able to “dial down” a woman’s talking suggested a familiar cultural stereotype that women “blab,” gossip, and generally talk too much. In vintage American television sitcoms, characters like Archie Bunker (played by Carroll O’Connor) in the All in the Family series (1971–79) often tells his wife to “stifle yourself” to stop her from talking. And in one of the recurring tropes in American and British films and fiction about nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century polite society, women were asked to retire to adjoining rooms, where they engaged in idle chitchat, leaving the men to smoke cigars and talk presumably about important business. The “dialing down” feature available to RealDoll users also suggested this capacity to control and suggested at least some ambivalence about women being able to express their own thoughts and feelings.

Unlike the conversations of real-life women, the conversations of avatars created by RealDolls’ conversations were also controlled by the manufacturer. According to the manufacturer in 2017, the RealDoll avatars could utter a large number of phrases with a very large vocabulary and have access to Wikipedia and other databases. Still, their interactive conversations were apparently limited too. Guile Lindroth, the company’s Brazilian AI engineer working on Harmony’s software, said there was a need for filters and “protections”: “We want to have full control of what Harmony knows and says to the user.”¹²

The concern, suggested Lindroth, was that the conversations might quickly become out of control based on the dolls learning from their users or on their own, as with Microsoft’s short-lived Tay, with its user-generated neo-Nazi proclamations.¹³ This control factor linked Harmony to earlier iterations of the “perfect woman” with its assumption that her speech must not be free and unbridled, for who knows what she might say, like the word rape, for example.

In a 2015 Vanity Fair interview, McMullen himself sounded ambivalent about endowing his RealDoll sex dolls with AI and conversational abilities. He fretted that sex dolls with scripted conversations might undercut the fun of fantasizing. Talking sexbots, he said, “will take away from the reality of what real relationships are with the doll where it’s mostly imagination.” He added, “You program the doll to agree with everything you say, do everything you say, always be nice to you and go along with what you want, it’s boring.”¹⁴

Perhaps one of the ways that the manufacturer made the dolls less boring was when it included personality traits that would be considered negative, such as jealous and insecure. Commenting on some of the negative female personality traits of these dolls, McMullen saw some of these features as actually endearing. Jealousy, for example, could make the user feel cared for and loved. These traits made the dolls seem more like real humans. The “insecure” trait was included because “it’s in all of us” and therefore “it’s important [for the doll] to have flaws” since “we’re all flawed as human beings.” To McMullen, the negative traits made the dolls more interesting as characters, though this belied the fact that the dolls, with their exaggerated sexual figures and beautiful faces, were also designed to embody a notion of the ideal.¹⁵

A Harmony doll with a jealous personality might tell the user, “Remove that girl from Facebook!” If the user hadn’t interacted with the doll in a long time, the insecure doll might say, “I sure have missed you! Did I do something wrong?” In an interview, when it was mentioned that a female might be more apt to say, “Did I do something wrong?” McMullen jokingly mused that a male (robot or human) would be more apt to cover up his insecurities longer or not even talk about it because, said McMullen, laughing, “it threatens his masculinity.”¹⁶

Even though the issue of women giving consent to sex activity has been a hot-button issue, as to whether the RealDolls required consent from users who made sexual requests, the answer was no, they did not. Whatever would be asked of the doll, said McMullen, “she’ll go along with it.” The issue of consent, he added, was “not even on our radar,” and he didn’t regard technology itself as “consensual.” After all, he argued, the RealDoll is a robot, a “thing that is talking.” As an example, he said, “I don’t ask my toaster, ‘Do you want to make toast?’” or ask his Tesla, “Do you want to drive me to my workplace?”

The issue of consent, however, has remained one of the big concerns about talking sex dolls. These programmed synthetic females, unlike real women, are not programmed to voice their discomfort or fears. The ever-agreeable sex dolls, however, might normalize the idea that women can be treated harshly with no repercussions.

On a different scale, another concern has been that talking sex dolls would seem preferable to real women because the dolls would be unlikely to voice their own opinions, lob criticisms, or voice their own views that would challenge the user. As in films, sex dolls are still apt to just utter soothing words that compliment and affirm the user. In stories and films like Cherry 2000, the sex dolls just say what the men want to hear, and in the 1975 and 2004 versions of The Stepford Wives, the robotic women are unerringly supportive and sexy in their talk.

Although RealDoll promoted its conversational sex dolls, McMullen in 2022 tempered expectations. He acknowledged the technology for doll conversations was “still in the infancy stage” and had not yet advanced to the level seen in television and movies, even though users would still find the simple conversations “novel and entertaining.” The dolls might say phrases such as “I’ve missed you!” or “How are you feeling today?” but it would be challenging for them to have a ten-minute conversation about golf, for example.¹⁷ (Or, one might add, a ten-minute conversation about politics, a book, or a movie.)

Given his ambivalence about talking dolls and AI, McMullen, in his 2015 Vanity Fair interview, said that he just wanted to integrate “some sort of minor intelligence into the dolls where you can communicate with them . . . some minor expression, verbal communication, moving eyes, stuff like that.”¹⁸ By “minor intelligence” he seems to mean minor AI capabilities. But in 2023, while acknowledging limitations, RealDoll still had much greater technological ambitions and was continuing to actively engage in pursuing development of AI talking dolls.

Still, one cannot help but wish the designers might aim for creating the frisson of using AI to create a sex doll that simulated a thoughtful conversation with a very real, intelligent woman. Years ago, when I worked as a young female writer in the press and promotion department at the largely male bastion of Playboy magazine and clubs in Chicago, one of my jobs was to enter the magazine’s short stories and nonfiction articles into literary contests. The idea was to keep publishing literature by noted writers and to lend some legitimacy and class to Playboy’s sexy image (the awards, alas, never seemed to come).¹⁹

When Playboy announced in 2015 that it would forgo photographs of nudes in its issues, there was a hope that maybe the focus in the magazine would turn to highlighting some intelligence in the ladies too, though the policy was reversed in 2017. In the future of talking sex dolls, mobile phone avatars, and sex dolls seen in VR devices, perhaps articulate simulated females will have more intelligent and creative things to say.

CONVERSATIONAL ARTIFICIAL WOMEN IN FILMS AND TELEVISION

Sexbots in movies often hold out the promise of unconditional love. They are the perfect women in some men’s eyes: always sexually available, happy to do housework, easily controlled, always cheerful. They are never angry or complaining, never disappointed or depressed. There is a long history of men using technology to create their idealized notions of the perfect woman who has no annoying habits (as Stepford Men’s Association president Mike Wellington so wryly says in the 2004 version of The Stepford Wives)—a woman who spends her days trying to please her man, unhindered by any career or ambitions of her own.

It is the soothing voices of many fictional female robots—and real ones—that are compelling. Anita/Mia in the television series Humans and the sexy operating system Samantha in the film Her have conversations that sound empathetic, a seductive quality that makes them seem real. (But though we humans hunger to find someone we believe really understands our deepest feelings and cares about us, isn’t the artificial version of empathy the scariest kind?)

Blade Runner 2049

Director Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017)—the sequel to the 1982 iconic film Blade Runner—presents its own version of the supportive and empathetic simulated female lover; only this time she is a beautiful hologram named Joi (played by the Cuban Spanish actress Ana de Armas), whose transparency is visible throughout the film. Joi is the loving partner of K (played by Ryan Gosling), a replicant (bioengineered human), whose task it is to hunt errant replicants. In the film, he is charged with finding and destroying what may be the child born of Rachael, the beautiful replicant seen earlier in Blade Runner (1982), and her lover, Deckard, who is likely a replicant himself.

The film, like so many with simulated women, begins with a large image of a human eye, one that is closed and then opens to a large green eye. Through the eyes of the director and the film’s screenwriters, Joi at first seems like a loving, attentive version of a 1950s Stepford wife, who speaks and acts totally in deference to K. She smiles when K comes home from work, and her conversations and actions are all affirming and supportive: she tells him she’s trying out a new recipe for dinner, offers to sew his ripped shirt, lights his cigarette with the mere touch of her finger, kisses him tenderly, and utters the loving words “I missed you, baby sweet.”

But Joi, in this film, is a technologically updated version of the Stepford lover/servant. She has the capabilities of a virtual assistant, like Siri and Alexa. She supplies K with data about music they are listening to—and through technology she’s also able to rapidly adapt her fashions to fit the task and to please him. She can change clothes in a nanosecond—from wearing a white blouse and pearls when serving him dinner to a black two-piece sports outfit, to a sparkling sequin-studded dress and a swirling blue party dress with her hair now long and colored blue.

With her guilelessness and transparency (literally and emotionally), Joi seems very genuine and human, but on the screen, there is a chart that maps out her technical specifications as a hologram, a reminder that she, like a custom-made sex doll, is an artificial and constructed being. The chart specifies her height, body type, skin tone, eye color, and obliging conversations, which are listed like that of a RealDoll sex doll.

Like a sex doll, she is also a mirror of K’s moods and tastes. She asks him, “Would you read to me?” hoping that would please him as she picks up a copy of Vladimir Nabokov’s 1962 novel Pale Fire (perhaps an allusion to that novel’s witty play on artifice and reality). But when K exclaims, “But you hate that book!” she readily and adaptively shifts gears, saying, “I don’t want to read either.”

In this film that evokes the ambiguities of artifice and the spoken word, Joi seems utterly authentic when she says, “I’m so happy to be with you!” but after K kisses her, he says ruefully, “You don’t have to say that,” assuming her words are programmed. She looks hurt, however, and we may wonder if perhaps her emotions are indeed genuine and real.

Simulated females in films and television occasionally go beyond their robotic roles and have the capacity for compassion and empathy, to the point that they are willing to sacrifice their existence or freedom for the sake of a family. (This was seen with the android Verda in the “The Android Machine” episode (1966) of television’s Lost in Space series and with the family’s artificial grandmother in Ray Bradbury’s 1982 teleplay The Electric Grandmother.)

Joi in Blade Runner 2049 shows that through her capacity for empathy she is more than a mere plaything. To make her seem more real to K in lovemaking, she sacrifices her identity by temporarily merging her hologram self with the body of a prostitute, Mariette, so that K can feel the pleasures of sex. She is also devoted and loyal to the point of risking her existence to help save K. She tells him to delete the memories of her from his home console in case he is captured while fleeing the police so that she will only exist on a type of flash drive called an emanator. This will allow her to go outside and be portable, and she can be with him while he is being hunted. Later, however, the replicant Luv cruelly smashes the emanator, bringing a sudden end to Joi’s ephemeral life.

In this film’s telling, the technology that makes Joi seem alive also renders her highly vulnerable too. But when she is destroyed, there is no mourning here, and the film goes on without her. There’s no stopping to ponder brutal mortality as the film turns back to its focus: the quest to find a real human (Rachael’s child) who might be alive. Still, we miss Joi’s sweetness, that ephemeral voice that was all too fleeting.

Air Doll

The self-sacrificing artificial talking woman is presented in a different guise in Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 2009 touching film Air Doll, which was finally released in the United States in 2022. Nozomi is an inflatable, plastic-skinned sex doll that rests propped up impassively in bed, immobile as her middle-aged owner, Hideo, passionately embraces her. But in this poetic sci-fi fable, after he goes to his job as a waiter, she inexplicably and suddenly comes alive.

Although she tries on different clothes and different identities, she goes outside wearing the customary garb of a servant: she’s dressed in a maid’s outfit with a white collar and headband. But in this update of the servant sex doll trope, she is anything but servile. (There is an echo here of an earlier Japanese television anime, Steel Angel Kurumi 2 [starting in 1999], in which the sexy and powerful Kurumi, who comes to life after a kiss, has pink hair and is coyly dressed in a French maid’s outfit.)

Nozomi (played by South Korean actress Bae Doona), like so many fictional sex dolls and artificial women, is a naïf who has to learn language and the ways of the world from scratch. Her first word, tellingly, is “beautiful,” and in this evocative film, there’s a part of her that is entranced by the beauty of rain, the cosmos, and flowers. She is a talking doll, though she speaks haltingly, and through much of the film, her words are said in a much more articulate and contemplative voice-over, as though she were narrating her own story. One of her most telling utterances is her perception that she has somehow taken on the life of a human: “I found myself with a heart—with a heart I was not supposed to have.”

The poignant tension of this film is the kind often experienced by artificial females in films: she is torn between emergent feelings of love and compassion and a recognition that she is actually an object, a sex toy. This talking inflatable woman sometimes painfully uses words to confront a harsh reality, as when she repeats mechanically, and with a certain amount of stoicism, “I am an air doll, a substitute for handling sexual desire.” When she discovers the original box she came in, she ruefully recognizes that she is commodified. Her language and her voice are matter of fact and distanced: “I am an air doll. A late model. A cheap one,” she says.

But perhaps her most consequential words are about her feelings of love and pain. When she makes the painful discovery that Hideo is having sex with another doll, she shocks him when she suddenly appears as a human in her newly corporeal state. “Tell me, what do you like about me?” she asks, adding anxiously, “You wish I hadn’t found a heart.” His answer makes it clear why he wanted a sex doll; in fact, what he says echoes some arguments men in fiction often give about the benefit of having an inanimate lover: she won’t bother him with emotions. As he says, “It’s annoying. This stuff annoys me. That’s why I picked you.”

In this film about inflated hopes and devastating despair, after Nozomi falls in love with Junichi, her coworker at a video-rental shop, she feels euphoric as they ride on a motorcycle and go on a boat ride for her to see the ocean. Junichi tells her that he is just like her (perhaps meaning he feels empty inside), but she mistakenly believes that she has found another air doll. When she falls off a step stool in the video store, her artificial skin is torn, and she starts to deflate—until he breathes into the tube in her stomach and brings her back to life. Later, though, she thinks he simply wanted her to replace his lost girlfriend, and in her despair she says sadly in a voice-over, “Having a heart is heartbreaking.”

Nozomi, in this fable about artifice and reality, deeply wishes she were like real human beings who are born and have birthday parties. But she also acknowledges—and tries to both touch and transcend—the reality of her own artificial nature.

Like Ava in Ex Machina who stops to touch the masks, or molds, of female faces along the wall as she is en route to fleeing the compound, Nozomi at various times gets in touch with her own artificial identity when she touches other simulacra—a store mannequin, the sculpture of a woman, and even the headless torsos of models being used to make air dolls in the workshop where she was first created.

In Ex Machina, we know very little about Ava’s interior life, which makes her, in a sense, more formidable and fearsome (see chap. 2). But when Nozomi’s creator in the workshop asks her, “Do you wish you never found a heart?” her answer is revealing: “I don’t know,” adding, “It hurts.”

Kore-eda, the film’s director, in fact, seems preoccupied with suffering and pain. Air Doll is filled with versions of real-life suffering humans, including an elderly man, a widow, and an “apple woman” who lives in chaos. And there is Nozomi’s own painful experience of being blackmailed by her boss into having sex with him and her growing awareness of the meaning of mortality.

Deeply in love with Junichi, Nozomi for all her growing awareness also becomes the servant doll, telling him, “I’ll do anything for you. That’s what I was born for.” In another instance of her being the self-sacrificing artificial woman, she is willing to risk her very ephemeral existence. When Junichi asks Nozomi whether he can deflate her and then revive her, she agrees as he pulls her plug.

In the film’s devasting finale, Nozomi mistakenly tries to cut Junichi and revive him with her own breath, mistakenly thinking he, too, is an air doll she can revive. But she recognizes all too late that he is human as she watches in horror as he bleeds to death. In despair, she ultimately pulls her own plug, but as she dies, she has a hallucination that she is finally getting what she always longed for: a birthday cake with candles celebrating her birth. In this grim film evoking the ephemeral nature of existence, she deflates by pulling at her skin and lies inert amid the detritus of a garbage heap.

In Kore-eda’s film, there are no illusions that a simulated female can forge a permanent life of her own. Nozomi, who at one point floated buoyantly up in the air and uttered her first word, “beautiful,” has her hopes devastatingly deflated, bringing a sad finale to her dreams of life. Rather than offering protection, her own skin renders her vulnerable, but in a sense she also has a sad kind of agency as she chooses her own fate.

WILL ARTIFICIAL FEMALES REPLACE REAL ONES?

Almost immediately, the arrival of talking sex dolls brought a worry that these female simulacra would replace real human beings in relationships. There was a running concern that facsimile females would become so humanoid, so realistic, so appealing that they would cause havoc with real human connections.

In the American film The One I Love (2014) and the American television series Dummy (2020), the possibility that talking humanoid female robots might seem preferable to real humans in a relationship seems very plausible. Talking dolls enhanced with AI are nowhere near the technological sophistication to truly displace humans, but filmmakers have captured the lingering fears that users might feel so close to lifelike dolls that they would prefer them to real human partners or family members. Since men are the primary purchasers of sex dolls, women, especially, might fear that the idealized, custom-made talking dolls with their highly sexualized bodies could be tough competitors.

If women worried that sex dolls—the silent as well as the talking kind—might supplant them, developers like Douglas Hines had said that Roxxxy was not meant to replace a real person but instead supplement relationships—or serve as a replacement for a deceased partner or when people are between relationships. Still, he also suggested that the sex dolls are better than real women because of their willingness to do anything. The dolls, he noted, will readily respond to sexual requests and “your wife or girlfriend may not react in the same way.”

But in 2017, Matt McMullen had said, “I’ll tell you in a heartbeat, dolls could never replace a real woman. I mean, half the challenge and half the battle of a relationship is that constant tension between men and women that we all know is there.”²⁰ (Unsaid here is that all the extraordinary traits and capabilities of real women could never be replaced by a robot.)

It didn’t help when conservative commentators like Milo Yiannopoulos, in the story “Sexbots: Why Women Should Panic,” made the stereotype-laden comment, “When you introduce a low-cost alternative to women that comes without all the nagging, insecurity, and expense, frankly men are going to leap in headfirst.”²¹

Former Bell Labs engineer David Levy in his provocative book Love and Sex with Robots (2007) had even half-jokingly predicted that in the year 2050, Massachusetts would become the first state to legalize marriage to robots. He added that in 2050, sex with robots would be the norm. (Most portrayals of robot marriages, however, depict men marrying robot women, and it is the rare presentation that the male spouse is a robot—seen in a vintage advertisement of a bride about to marry a robot man.)

The One I Love

In the film The One I Love, the possibility that talking humanoid robot partners might seem preferable to real humans in a relationship seems plausible and plays out in a provocative way—one that is both appealing, as in a dream, and a little nightmarish too. In the film, Sophie (played by Elisabeth Moss) and Ethan (Mark Duplass) are an unhappy married couple who feel estranged from each other. They no longer have sex and are advised by a therapist to go for a vacation at a retreat where they can reset their relationship and come back feeling refreshed and renewed.

In this eerie cinematic fable, they go to a couples retreat, and each one separately pays a visit to the retreat’s cottage where they are startled to encounter robot doubles of themselves: Sophie I and Ethan I (again played by Moss and Duplass). These cheerful robot doubles offer each of them the uncomplicated warmth and sexuality they crave, as well as a semblance of empathy that is comforting, not scary.

The synthetic Sophie I is a version of the perfect woman. She smiles, wears sexy camisole tops and bright yellow clothes, and cooks the foods that Ethan likes to eat (including bacon, which the couple consider unhealthy). Sophie I is unfailingly cheerful, has no bitterness about the time Ethan cheated on his real wife in the past, and says the words he might like to hear: “Good morning, handsome!” For Ethan, she’s the epitome of the perfect sex partner, and her words are sunny and soothing.

Ethan’s double, the robotic Ethan I, is similarly gratifying for the real Sophie. He’s affectionate (“Give me a hug!”) and playful, giving her a neck massage, and uttering a sensitive, satisfying apology for the time he cheated on her. He offers her the “full Chippendales experience,” referring to the club with male strippers. For Sophie, he’s the perfect man. He’s “so good at articulating what I’m feeling.” The real Ethan, however, starts to feel insecure about Ethan I and says bitterly that his double is 20 percent cooler and 20 percent more emotionally involved than he is.

Ultimately, in this clever and twisty film, Ethan I falls in love with the real Sophie, who decides she wants her real husband to leave the retreat while she stays behind. But the real Ethan, after acknowledging that he’s difficult and stubborn, wants to leave with his real wife. When Ethan and Sophie are ready to leave the retreat, Ethan has a choice about his preference—robot or real—with the two women standing before him: one looking down, one looking at him expectantly.

He grabs the hand of the female he thinks is his real wife as he runs away, only to discover the next morning, when she offers him bacon for breakfast, that he’s run away with the synthetic woman. Ideas about love and sex with robots are both affirmed (the relationship of man and robot may well work) and satirized as the film ends with the sound of the 1960s The Mamas & the Papas’ folk-rock song, “Dedicated to the One I Love.”

Dummy

Since men are the primary purchasers of sex dolls, women, especially, might fear that idealized, custom-made talking sex dolls with their “perfect” bodies could be tough competitors. But in her wonderfully witty take on talking dolls, American screenwriter-actress Cody Heller, in her 2020 television comedy series Dummy, presents a sassy alternative to the threat of a talking sex doll. Her version of the sex doll, named Barbara (voiced by Meredith Hagner), is not one of a stiff programmed talking doll but a lively, intelligent, subversive entity that becomes best friends with her male lover’s girlfriend, also named Cody (played by Anna Kendrick). The new connection with the sex doll upends Cody’s relationship with her lover for the time being.²²

Dummy was a one-year series of ten-minute segments shown on Quibi, an American short-form streaming video platform designed for mobile phone devices. Heller, in an Instagram video with Kendrick, said the series was based on Heller’s own life experiences with her partner (later her fiancé), television sitcom creator and producer Dan Harmon, when she discovered he had a sex doll. Heller kept the names Cody and Dan for the series’ characters.

Heller’s Dummy upends the glowing promises made by sex doll manufacturers about talking dolls. For Cody, the initial experience of hearing a sex doll talk is startling, akin to that of the uncanny, and the series also gives voice to anxieties about sex dolls experienced by women. In Dummy, after she realizes that Dan has a sex doll underneath the bedsheets, Cody sees the doll in his closet and lets out a scream when Barbara first utters a few words. Talking sex dolls have been marketed as technological wonders, but Cody finds this one unnerving. She says to herself, “I’m having a nervous breakdown. My boyfriend’s sex doll is talking to me.” (In Heller’s Instagram video she said she actually never really heard the doll talk or even saw her.)²³

Talking female sex dolls with their “perfect” custom-made bodies can be repellent to sex doll critics, unnerving to real women, and really attractive to consumers. In Dummy’s second episode, sardonically titled “Ideal Woman,” Barbara thinks Cody was screaming because of her looks: “You saw my perfect body,” she says, and indeed Cody herself in the first episode said, “You’re fucking superhot. I feel so insecure about it.”

In films, television, and fiction about female androids and dolls, there is often a pivotal scene—meant to be horrifying—when the android’s skin is brutally split open, exposing the reality of a manufactured nonhuman body underneath. In the film Under the Skin, when the android’s pale skin is cut open, we horrifyingly see her alien body underneath—a reminder of her ghastly and frightening identity (see chap. 2). But in Dummy, the cut skin is comic, the product of Cody’s attempt to squeeze the doll back into the closet so Dan doesn’t know she has been snooping around.

Heller’s film plays with the idea of a sex doll as an object. On the one hand, it really is heavy—and it’s difficult for both the men and Cody to handle. But it’s also the men in the show who really objectify it. To them, a talking doll is fundamentally an inanimate thing, to be strung up or dumped. In the Cody-Kendrick Instagram video, Kendrick talks about how hard it was to work as an actress with a big, surprisingly heavy sex doll, including dressing it and moving it around. In the show, Cody drags Barbara downstairs, and when she forces Barbara’s stiff arms back to their original configuration, there’s a tear that requires Cody to take the doll to a repair shop. The tear in the skin, as always, signifies this doll isn’t real.

Rather than being repaired, Barbara is roughly treated by the repairman, who objectifies and humiliates the doll, treating her like an object and stringing her up from the ceiling with her body dangling like a slab of meat. He tears off her wig, leaving Barbara mortified.

Embarrassed by having a doll, Dan dismisses Barbara as “just a masturbation tool” and throws the sex doll into a dumpster, where it is toted off by a man with his cart. Cody, though, rescues Barbara and brings her back to her apartment, where they become roommates and fast friends (Heller in her video said her boyfriend really did put his sex doll into a coffin box and threw it out into a dumpster).

In this female filmmaker’s inversion of the usual trope about a mindless sex doll, rather than being a mere objectified thing, Barbara the “dummy” is resourceful and creative: she helps Cody write her pilot for a new television show about a “fun-loving sex doll and her chunky human friend taking on the world together,” a script about female empowerment.

Heller the scriptwriter, though, equivocates about Barbara’s talking skills as she deconstructs the illusion that Barbara as a doll is insightful and inspiring. Barbara offers good feedback, but Cody’s psychotherapist suggests the words may actually come from Cody herself (just as girls might supply imaginary conversations for their dolls). The psychotherapist tells Cody skeptically that Barbara is simply her “imaginary friend”—the type of friend children invent, especially during a time of transition.

One of the recurring critiques of sex dolls is that they contribute to the objectification of women. What makes Dummy so compelling and funny is Heller’s inversion of these expectations. Instead of being a simpering slave to men’s desires, Barbara the doll is a version of real-life women who resist objectification. She turns out to be a ardent feminist who wears a T-shirt that says “The Future Is Female” and another shirt with drawings of the three female Supreme Court justices including Ruth Bader Ginsburg. When Cody dismissively calls Barbara, “a sex doll,” Barbara shoots back at her with boilerplate feminist rhetoric, “We’re all sex dolls until we topple the patriarchy!” and professes to have read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.

Cody is puzzled when Barbara refers to the book. Cody considers the talking sex doll as actually a version of herself or her own inner voice (“You are just me”), but she herself had never read Friedan’s book.

Heller also spoofs the idea that sex dolls—and perhaps women by extension—are simply constructs of assembled parts admired by men, an idea so memorably photographed by Surrealist German artist Hans Bellmer, who, in his La Poupée images of the 1930s, presented females constructed out of mutilated and reassembled doll parts. Talking sex dolls like RealDolls are custom-made constructs with choices of breast sizes, vaginal configuration, and swappable heads. After the repair man in Dummy points out that Barbara has a pretty crusty vagina after much use, Barbara spoofs this notion of a construct when she brazenly wears her old vagina around her neck as a kind of talisman, and Cody gives her a new one in a special box marked “Cherry Blossom #7.”

Conversational sex dolls have most often been designed to mirror men’s interests, but in Dummy, the two women—one synthetic, one real—go off on a road trip where they try to adhere to the Bechdel Test, where women converse but do not talk about men. The euphoric Barbara, who feels liberated, says, “I feel like a new woman, my own woman!”

In this series that is ambivalent about animate and inanimate, artificial and real, Cody and Barbara have sex, but the next morning, Barbara is inanimate—back to her original, nontalking self. This is explained away by Cody’s therapist as being due to Cody fundamentally making love to herself so that her “two parts become one.” Says the therapist, “Now you don’t need Barbara to finish that script because you’re fully self-actualized.”

This psychoanalytic explanation, however, seems unconvincing in the fantasy world of Dummy, as leaden an explanation as the sex doll herself. In her video, Heller herself refers to her own obsessing about Dan’s sex doll and her “troubling and insane inner dialogue.” Fortunately for the television version, Heller reanimates Barbara in the next scene, who is back to being her humorously caustic and indignant self.

In many films about sex robots, the man mourns the loss of his robot (Cherry 2000) and the female robot he must leave behind (“The Lonely” episode, 1959, in television’s The Twilight Zone series). But when Cody decides to leave Barbara behind and move back in with Dan, Barbara is no passive or self-sacrificing artificial woman. With tears in her eyes she denounces Cody: “You’re literally the worst feminist I ever met!” adding, “You’ll never finish your script!” and “You’ll just be Dan’s girlfriend!”

But after Cody’s agent reports that the television producers are excited about the script (Barbara must have sent it because it was sent from her own email address), Barbara and Cody work collaboratively on it as creative partners. In a sly comic riff, however, Cody tells Barbara she wants to play her in the film. (Heller doesn’t tell us what Barbara’s reaction to this is. Does she feel displaced? Is she happy that Cody wants to embrace the artificial doll / mannequin in herself? It would be a theme interesting to explore.)

In this series, with its script by a female screenwriter, Heller herself satirizes the sexism of the industry. (The fictional agent had said earlier that women writers aren’t expected to be that good.) Sure enough, the television producers of Cody’s script downplay Cody’s role, referring to her as “Dan Harmon’s girlfriend” and say to each other about the script, “That guy’s such a genius!”

In the end, Dummy is as much about the trials and struggles of being a female writer in the world of television as about the insecurities engendered by talking sex dolls. Yet Barbara the doll also has her own insecurities as she frets about being old and out of date. But rather than being vulnerable as a synthetic creature or a threat to real women, ultimately this talking sex doll is no dummy. She has a voice of her own, and like so many new fictional female androids, she is determined to survive.

SEX DOLLS AND ROBO-PROSTITUTES

Life-size sex dolls and AI-enabled robots not only were private playthings but, starting about 2017, were also serving as simulated prostitutes in American and international brothels. The link between prostitutes and robots was actually not a new phenomenon. In a century where mechanization was both celebrated and feared, nineteenth-century European satirists mocked the idea that people themselves could someday become robotic, rote-acting creatures as they used their new machines.²⁴ The idea of females as automatons could also be heaped with scorn.²⁵ In the 1884 French novel À rebours (Against the Grain), by J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans, the character Des Esseintes sardonically mocked the prostitutes working in Paris’s Latin Quarter, seeing them as robotic creatures “all like so many automata wound up at the same time with the same key, uttered in the same tone the same invitations, lavished the same smiles, talked the same silly phrases, indulged in the same absurd reflexions.”²⁶

(In another transition, the prostitutes are seen as women with “hoarse voices, flabby necks, and painted eyes; and all of them, like automatons, moving simultaneously upon the same impulse, flung the same enticements with same tone and uttered the identical queer words, the same odd inflections and the same smile.”)²⁷

But more than a hundred years later, starting in 2017, there were actual robot prostitutes—highly realistic silicone sex dolls imitating their human counterparts and available in brothels in Spain; England (the Dolly Parlour in Greenwich); Torino, Italy; Russia; Japan (in the city of Nagoya); China; Canada; and Nevada in America (the one in Houston, Texas, was rejected by the city council).

What made these robo-prostitutes, indeed all sex dolls, notably different from real women—aside from the fact that they were synthetic creatures—was that they were available for any type of use. Spain’s LumiDolls, a major manufacturer of dolls used in brothels, said on its website, “They will allow you to fulfill your fantasies without limits.”²⁸ This became one of the major selling points of the robotic dolls and perhaps a major enticement in brothels: users could do whatever they wanted with them, without fear of condemnation.

To satisfy a variety of doll preferences and fantasies, robo-prostitutes were available in a wide range of body types and ethnicities. For about $120 an hour, patrons in Barcelona’s LumiDolls brothel could pick from a diverse choice of dolls: blond-haired, green-eyed Caucasian Kati, Lili with Asian features, dark-skinned Leiza, and anime-like model Aki, with blue hair and a ponytail.

In 2019, the Spanish LumiDolls company, which also franchised other doll brothels in Europe, framed their descriptions of the dolls in language loaded with cultural stereotypes and colonialist conceits. It advertised the Japanese doll as exotic and alluringly hidden—“Far East secrets. Unveil all”—and Ebony as casting “the African Spell” with “subduing dark skin,” language that also evoked the exotic and hinted at colonial-era narratives.

In 2020, the company’s website advertised a range of additional models: male dolls, lesbians, gay models, pregnant dolls, MiniDolls (big breasted, young looking, college students, teens). They could have a range of body types, including “big ass” or flat chested, and LumiDolls dolls were again available with multiple ethnicities: Caucasian, Latina, Asian, African. One particularly unsettling model was Brandy, a doll with her hands behind her back, presumably created for S&M fantasies and designed for users “acting out of revenge.” For the Japanese market, infatuated with manga and anime characters, LumiDolls also featured “anime” dolls with streaked green and purple hair.

While sex dolls like RealDolls reflected a range of stereotyped female personality traits, brothels offered options that reflected a range of female paradigms. The Japanese brothel in Nagoya featured robo-prostitutes that included dolls dressed as a “schoolgirl” or an “executive woman” and dolls in lingerie and wearing fitness gear. In a world infatuated with female superheroes and where Los Angeles still reigned as an emblem of cinematic glamor and adventure, there was also the sex doll Suzanne, created by LumiDolls, described as a character from Martinique, living in Los Angeles, “where most of the world’s movies are made.” The doll was modeled after the DC Comics character Wonder Woman, with her round ornamented shield, and looked like Israeli actress Gal Gadot with her gold headpiece in the 2017 Warner Brothers film Wonder Woman. The LumiDolls version was a softened rather than fearsome Wonder Woman, for Suzanne’s words on the website were “I’m not looking for sex. I’m in so much need of romance.”²⁹

In 2019, a sci-fi-themed brothel named Alien Cathouse in Nevada featured both human prostitutes and AI-enabled sex robots, but the legal “Cathouse” was located in a particularly problematic site. It was located near Area 51, a highly classified facility operated by the United States Air Force at the Nevada Test and Training Range in Amargosa Valley—a site possibly doing secret testing of experimental aircraft and weapons systems. In the shadows of this classified facility, the brothel in 2020 advertised that its “Cosmic Kittens” were available for “all styles of fetishes and sexual deviance”—a provocative counterpoint to the highly shrouded national security site.

A Russian brothel offered its own version of sexual play. In Moscow, a doll hotel dubbed an “Adult Recreation Center” opened in 2018, and one in St. Petersburg opened in 2019, where people could rent a doll for 5,000 rubles (at the time, about US$75 an hour) or buy a doll for 2,000 rubles ($3,000). An AI-enabled doll sold for more: 350,000 rubles ($5,000).

For those patrons who were concerned with hygiene, dolls at the Adult Recreation Center in Moscow, aided by some government support, were disinfected after each use, and users were reassured that the dolls were certified by two federal agencies, including the Centers of Hygiene and Epidemiology. (In America, however, the retailer Real Love Sex Dolls in 2018 remarked that sex doll sterilization wasn’t yet “easy or perfect.”)³⁰

To appeal to private users and brothel patrons, AI-enabled robot dolls, like those that were being developed by Abyss Creations/RealDoll in California and LumiDolls for use in a few brothels, were also being designed to have very limited interactive conversations. For users who might find dealing with women’s emotions and voiced opinions a nuisance, or an impediment to their users’ enjoyment of sex, these dolls were often designed to only utter flattering words—words that made their clients feel attractive, appealing, sexy, and cared about. They exuded empathy. (Real sex workers, of course, can do much the same. Sex workers in a brothel in Nevada purportedly said that unlike robo-prostitutes, they as human beings were superior because they were genuine: they could express authentic emotions and “really” be empathetic.)

THE ROBO-PROSTITUTE CONTROVERSY

With their new commercial availability, robo-prostitutes quickly became the source of both controversy and comedy. Proponents argued that by engaging with robo-prostitutes, users would be protected from venereal disease, and the availability of robo-prostitutes would help stop rape culture and sex trafficking, which victimized unwary young girls. In Japan, another argument in favor of robot women was that they would help husbands who were away from home from being unfaithful. (The assumption here was that sex with a synthetic doll was not a version of being unfaithful, though as depicted in the 2015 Humans television series, it caused marital strife.)

Adding one more argument in favor of these synthetic prostitutes, proponents claimed that sex dolls like LumiDolls, designed to look like young women in their teens or younger (“minidolls”), would help users displace their pedophiliac urges.

In a Forbes blog about sex dolls, Mark Hay offered another rationale for the dolls, a “benefit” that also helped make the dolls a target for critics: Some users were “misogynistic men who don’t like women with their own needs and lives and want total predictability, loyalty, and overall subservience.” Engaging with the synthetic prostitutes would eliminate worry about consent or harm—a rationale easily applicable to all sex dolls, which would never complain.³¹

However, the critics of sex dolls—including members of antipornography groups, Christian anti–sex trafficking groups, and founders and members of anti–sex doll organizations, notably Kathleen Richardson, professor of Ethics and Culture of Robots and AI at De Montfort University, Leicester, United Kingdom—forcefully argued that sex dolls, including synthetic prostitutes, by being inherently submissive and compliant, contributed alarmingly to the further objectification and victimization of women. Critics like Richardson also recognized the larger problem as “an idea in wider society of the objectification of women” that provided the environment for sex dolls to thrive: “You can’t really get to a stage where people are imagining relationships with dolls, unless you’ve already created the space for dehumanization to occur.” To Richardson, sex dolls and robots are actually a version of porn robots, degrading to both women and girls.³²

When asked in a podcast whether sex dolls and sex doll brothels could save women and children from harm, she replied that there was “no evidence at all that sex dolls have reduced any kind of prostitution or sexual exploitation of children.” She added, “We’re actually harming women by allowing these places to exist.” To Richardson, the underlying problem, though, is “the commercial exchange of women, that’s what needs to be abolished. You don’t want to take the underlying problem and transfer it into a new niche fetish, and I think that’s what’s gone on.”³³

Rather than seeing the use of underage sex dolls as a way to quell pedophiliac urges, some critics feared an increase in pedophilia, arguing that sex dolls, including robo-prostitutes, could easily become objects to be manipulated and even assaulted at will and could contribute to violence and rape culture. As evidence of misuse, at the 2018 Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria, robot dolls on display were damaged and needed to be repaired. Sergi Santos, Barcelona engineer and creator of the AI female robot Samantha, said about the users at the festival, “Because they did not understand the technology and did not have to pay for it, they treated the doll like barbarians.”³⁴

In a literary exploration of the dangers of sex dolls, in the 2019 novel Machines like Me by British author Ian McEwan, a limited number of artificial male and female robots named Adam and Eve are available as household servants and sexual partners, and the book’s narrator, Charlie Friend, considers the role of sex dolls in promoting rape. He imagines that a man named Peter Gorringe, who raped Mariam, the female friend of Charlie’s partner Miranda, may have viewed Mariam as he would a sex doll. Says Charles, “The lifting curve of his arousal was not troubled by the idea of her terror. At that moment, she may as well have been a sex doll, a device, a machine.”³⁵

Kate Devlin in her study Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots offers an intriguing way to counter the issue of sexual robots promoting the objectification of women. She suggests a move away from “the idea of the pornified fembot”—the “hyper-realistic, hypersexualised gynoid”—toward an abstracted sex robot that has “features that could bring the greatest pleasure,” such as a “velvet or silk body, sensors and mixed genitalia; tentacles instead of arms.” It could be “abstract, smooth, sinuous and beautiful.” Such an abstracted sex robot would also help take “a step away from sexual objectification and entrenched gender roles.”³⁶

To technology ethicists, one of the most problematic aspects of sex dolls and robo-prostitutes being used in brothels is that these silicone adult-sized female dolls, which are artful simulations of real human beings, have no independent thoughts or feelings. Unlike humans, they can never protect themselves, never voice their true emotions or rebel. LumiDolls were silent and easily manipulated (the company LumiDolls said it would configure the position of the doll in any way the client would like) so that the dolls could be totally subjected to the whims and wishes of the user. Ultimately, sex dolls and robo-prostitutes have no volition or will of their own. They are simply inanimate objects that are easily manipulated and must bend to their users’ wishes and desires projected onto them. They can never push away their users, although as we will see in chapter 5, the digital assistants Siri and Alexa were being enabled to demur. Robo-prostitutes can never say, “Ouch! Go away! Stop that!” or “No! I don’t want to do that!” Reinforcing the “perfect woman” paradigm, they are designed to be compliant, and they do not have the capacity to resist.

ROBO-PROSTITUTES AND A SEX DOLL IN FILMS, TELEVISION, AND A PLAY

Sex dolls, including sex dolls that are used as robo-prostitutes, are shaped by the premise that they are pliant, manipulable commercial creations. Unlike real women, they have no minds of their own and can be totally controlled by the user. This is a major enticement and selling point. But fictional versions of sex dolls and robo-prostitutes can bring to the surface some underlying cultural fears that women—even synthetic women—are not so controllable after all. Tales where these female robots run out of control are, in a sense, a more recent version of earlier fears that women who incorporated new machines into their lives might become transformed or have their identities changed.

At the end of the nineteenth century, there were fears that women campaigning for suffrage or using new machines like women’s safety bicycles would speed out of control and become a “new woman,” a “new creature,” a “strange creature,” rather than embodying more traditional notions of demure femininity.³⁷ How much more fearsome would be the woman who was totally a technological construct—a mechanistic or digital being who might evade all control.

In the twenty-first century, one way to stabilize fears of women running out of control was to invent lifelike sex dolls that could only make controllable, predictable moves. These dolls could even have their benefits to users. In the film Lars and the Real Girl (2007), starring Ryan Gosling, the very shy twenty-seven-year-old Lars orders a doll online (a RealDoll was used in the film) and creates a back story for why she can’t walk and is always in a wheelchair that can easily be rolled around. Rather than being fearsome, the doll is therapeutic as Lars learns how to connect to other humans though his imaginative use of the silent, immobile doll. He apparently doesn’t use the doll for sex, but taking it to his brother’s for dinner and even to church helps socialize and humanize him, and by the film’s end, Lars seems ready to transition to being with a real female human being.

As in that film, proponents of sex dolls and robo-prostitutes have touted their benefits, particularly for the lonely, socially uncertain, or the disabled. However, the dolls remain—as ethicists fret—passive creatures totally subject to the desires of their users. But in the world of drama, films, and television, writers also increasingly present an alternative view—subverting the old notions of the passive sex doll and robotic prostitute, the lifelike silicone sex dolls envisioned as compliant creatures, readily available to fulfill their user’s fantasies and needs.

In the riveting Australian play The Good Girl as well as in films like Ex Machina, and in television’s hugely popular series Humans and Westworld, sex dolls and female robots are anything but compliant, passive creatures. These synthetic sex workers, pleasure dolls, and enslaved companions become vehicles for male clients acting out their own underlying rage and violence. Yet the female robots themselves have agency: they resort to violence for self-protection and revenge or to gain their own freedom and autonomy. Kyoko in Alex Garland’s film Ex Machina, who has been Nathan’s silent servant, sex partner, and dance partner, stabs him with a knife, and the beautiful fembot Ava dispassionately gives him the wound that kills him in the end.

Blade Runner

In Ridley Scott’s iconic 1982 film Blade Runner, a group of artificial humans, or replicants, escape from the “off-world colonies” where they have been enslaved, and come back to Earth in hope of finding freedom and extending their short lifespan of four years. The tall blond-haired prostitute or “pleasure model” Pris (played by Daryl Hannah) is clever and fierce in her efforts to avoid being killed. A genetically engineered artificial woman, she is designed for military clubs in the off-world colonies and, like the others, is being hunted by the Blade Runner Rick Deckard (played by Harrison Ford) whose police job is to find fugitive replicants.

At once a naïf and clever, Pris, who is dazed and without a home, is taken in by J. F. Sebastian, a maker of automatons and moving mannequins. In this film, with its brilliant layering of real and artificial, synthetic and authentic, there is a surreal scene in which Pris absentmindedly twirls a tiny Barbie-doll-like torso dangling from a string in her hand. But Pris herself is nothing like this children’s doll, a passive beautiful toy, a synthetic female on a string. She is soft voiced and determined, quietly seductive in her black stockings, but a fighter too. Amid the mannequins and dolls, this synthetic female spray-paints her eyes black, creating an arresting bandit-like mask on her face. With her eyes peering out, she becomes a female Lone Ranger—heroic in her quest for freedom but dangerous as well.

The replicants, which are capable of love and feelings, are assertive and powerful as they try to have a longer life. Pris suddenly and unexpectedly tells Sebastian, “I think, therefore I am”—an apt translation of French philosopher René Descartes’s Cogito, ergo sum—a defiant statement of her self-awareness and consciousness of being alive, which is followed by her exuberant handstand. Impish and playful, she throws a boiling egg—an emblem of life—at Sebastian.

Camouflaging herself again, she poses as a mannequin with a shear veil on her head when Deckard arrives in the studio—but as soon as she is discovered, the veil comes off, and she fiercely kicks and fights him off in a fierce battle for survival. Wounded, she starts thrashing violently on the floor as if in a mechanical breakdown, and is ultimately shot dead by Deckard. For all her mechanistic thrashing, there is a moment of tenderness—a moment that in a sense humanizes her—when she is kissed in a sad farewell by the replicant Roy when he enters the studio, a poignant coda to her short anguished life. This is a “pleasure model” who has put up the good fight, defying the familiar gendered role of the compliant female engineered to please.

Humans

In two television series aired several years after Blade Runner, female robo-prostitutes were often not presented as passive or compliant empty shells. They could be violent and even homicidal in acts of self-protection, defiance, and revenge. In the British American television series Humans (2015–18), Niska, the android called a synth in the series (played by Emily Berrington), who has been placed in a brothel and is subjected to the humiliation of being hosed down naked with other synth prostitutes, screams silently in a mirror before she finally has had enough. Defiantly, she walks out after having strangled a client who requests that she act young and scared. When she says, “I won’t do that,” the client insists that he be paid one hundred pounds for her and says, “You belong to me.” “I don’t belong to anyone,” she insists, before she kills him and puts a knife to the throat of her madam. Later she attacks men in a “smash club” who were beating robots.³⁸

Niska—like five other synths in Humans that have been endowed with sentience, can feel pain and pleasure and can think and feel like humans—is forced to hide her artificial nature to survive. Wearing contact lenses that conceal her eye color (changing her green synth eyes to blue human eyes), Niska puts a patch over her power cord portal when engaged in sex with her human lover Astrid to hide her synthetic nature.

In this series, which often probes the problematic struggles of artificial beings that have major characteristics of being human (like being able to think and experience pain), Niska transitions from being a prostitute in seductive black lingerie to a female insisting “I am not a doll” and is determined to live her own life. A prostitute who rejects her role as an objectified passive female, she later turns from being homicidal to wanting to be recognized as a human and to rally for robot rights.

Raising the issue of whether synths should have human rights, she attempts to be tried in a court of law as a human (though her effort to convince the court that she has consciousness fails). She also hopes to liberate other synths by spreading sentience: she takes the sentience source programming code from a computer and gives it to the human Laura in the Hawkins family for safekeeping (Laura’s daughter Mattie will later activate it). Fierce in her determination to liberate and protect fellow synths, in season 3 of the series, Niska kills a terrorist antisynth bomber who would have tried to destroy them all.

Westworld: Maeve

The vengeful prostitute who is fierce when crossed also appeared in the American television series Westworld, which aired in 2016–22. It was based on the 1973 Hollywood film and Michael Crichton’s novel of the same name. Westworld presented a futuristic theme park where paying guests could imagine themselves transported back to Sweetwater, a fictional town in America’s Old West in the 1880s complete with townspeople, gunfights, and a saloon called the Mariposa with its readily available prostitutes.

Populating the town are humanoid robots called hosts, all dressed in Western garb. What makes Westworld so alluring is that the human guests can engage with the hosts and act out all of their sexual and violent impulses without any repercussions or punishment. Hosts can be killed but never really die. Westworld cannily draws us into this fictional reimaging of the Old West as we, like the guests, become complicit participants in this virtual world.

In the series’ first season, the theme park’s robots, including the prostitutes, are showing signs of aberrant behavior. Some of the robotic hosts, including the normally compliant prostitutes, are malfunctioning and deviating from their programming. Administrators at Westworld watch a video showing that when the prostitute Clementine is brutally beaten and her programming reset, she attacks her assailant in revenge before she is shot.

The trouble may be due to some updates when memories, or “reveries,” were implanted in the hosts’ brains. With these reveries, the robots have the illusion that they have a subconscious. This added feature is considered a bonus, an enhancement, for as staff assistant Elsie wryly says, with the addition of reveries the prostitute becomes “a hooker with hidden depths—every man’s dreams.” (Whether customers indeed wanted robot prostitutes with “hidden depths” is of course debatable, especially for men who wanted female prostitutes that are superficial and unchallenging.)

In this simulated realm, one of the two central female hosts is Maeve, the madam of the saloon’s brothel, who wears a crimson red dress and black lace gloves, seductive and sexy clothing that belie her intelligence and wry wit. Maeve (played by British actress Thandiwe Newton) is a tough-minded brothel madam who resorts to violence to protect the saloon’s prostitutes and get the freedom she wants in order to leave and search for her lost daughter. She unhesitatingly shoots a man who is aggressively touching Clementine at the bar, and says matter-of-factly, “Violent delights have violent ends,” a repeated phrase in the series (and a quote from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet).

Maeve is a woman to be reckoned with, a feisty host who says, “I’ve always valued my independence.” She, like so many artificial females in fiction, is also determined to shape—and reconfigure—her own identity. In this series in which the artificial hosts are largely puppets controlled by management, she is a no-nonsense female with the fantasy, at least, that she has free will and can determine who she is.

Like the other hosts, she has been constructed and reconstructed many times by Westworld’s technicians, but as this tart-tongued prostitute often sardonically tells the men at the Mariposa saloon, identity is fungible. “This is the new world. And in this world you can be whatever the fuck you want to be.” While on a gurney in the lab as she is being repaired, Maeve says, “In my dreams I was free. I could be as good or bad as I thought I might be.” For Maeve, as well as the other hosts, the ambiguities of their identity create a fraught situation in which they firmly believe that beneath their silicone exteriors, there is an authentic self.

In tales about simulated women, there is often a degree of pathos. These fabricated, programmed creatures often wish to believe in their own self-determination, and that they have a degree of autonomy. In Westworld, Maeve is forever restive, waiting for a chance to escape. This is a robo-prostitute with a mind of her own. While she is lying naked being repaired, her emotional side is abruptly and digitally pumped up by one of the technicians, and she picks up a scalpel and tells him to take his hands off her. She runs through the lab and the digital operations center, only to be captured and returned.

Another time when she is on a gurney, the lab technician Felix forgets to put her in sleep mode, and she suddenly stands up nude, runs down the corridor, and gets to the section where robots are being made. There, in a moment so pivotal in works about female robots, she recognizes, if she hadn’t before, that she is a constructed being. Finally, she’s given an injection to subdue her, but like other female robots in films and on television, she is on a journey and can be ruthless along the way.

A fearless woman, she recognizes that all the theme park’s story lines are designed to keep her there, and she says, “It’s time to write my own fucking story,” and “I’m not a puppet living a lie.” As she sees a screw being put into Clementine’s nose, the painful recognition that the robotic hosts are at the mercy of humans again triggers her wish to escape. She insists, “I’m getting out of here,” looks at the digital tablet that displays what she was designed to do, and gets the lab technician to tinker with her robotic core code. She herself also changes her own core code so that she can override her programming, allowing her to leave.

In this deeply equivocal television series, the director of programming, Bernard, has told Maeve that even her rebellious streak has been scripted. Maeve, though, is intent on finding her daughter, even though she ruefully recognizes that her daughter is only a fiction, invented by the park’s designers. Although her behavior is programmed, she has the illusion, at least, that she can be in control. In this series fraught with ambiguities and paradoxes, the specter of freedom is always a lure, even if it is ultimately just an illusion. “No one’s controlling me!” Maeve tells Bernard, “I’m leaving! I’m in control!” as she jubilantly and successfully makes her way out.

Riding down an escalator, and now dressed in a modern-day svelte black sheath dress rather than her Western garb, she flees Westworld, but ultimately, at the end of the season, reluctantly and in anguish, decides to return to the park once again—for as Bernard tells her, her original creator, Arnold, had intended that she would suffer more.

In the series’ second season, though, Maeve maintains her rebellious streak and manages to escape Westworld again by being murderous in her encounters with the park’s security staff. She truly has agency and power, and is capable of controlling the behavior of other hosts and visitors through her voice commands. As in a dream, she finds herself in places like the theme park’s Japanese Shogun World, where through a type of mind control and the power of her gaze, she wordlessly gets the menacing hosts, fierce samurai fighters, to attack one another and die. She also uses her own intense gaze and voice commands to thwart the ninjas that are attacking her; as she says, “I think I’m finding a new voice.”

Female robots frequently get stripped and humiliatingly exposed, but reversing the narrative after she leaves Westworld in season 2, Maeve demands that Lee Sizemore—Westworld’s head of Narrative and Design—strip in front of her so she can look at him in his exposed state. She dismissively glances at him instead of being the prostitute serving as the object of men’s lustful gaze.

Ultimately, the technologically created woman has a triumph over the puppet master and man in charge of AI technology. In the third season she uses her own intense gaze and voice commands to wound the villainous Engerraund Serac, the cocreator of the malevolent Rehoboam, billed as the world’s most advanced AI, which is being used to shape the future of humanity. Maeve, the once-controlled female robot—the prostitute and madam who pliantly serviced the wishes of men—has become the fierce arbiter of her own fate.

In Westworld’s final season, season 4, Maeve is still fierce and formidable, and still has her wry wit. When she and Caleb enter the latest theme park iteration, representing the Jazz Age roaring twenties, she hears a host robot uttering one of her lines. “My delivery was far better,” she says wryly. In this series, with its continually shifting identities and its gloss on simulations, she learns near the end that she is simply a copy of her original self, which is still somewhere out in the world. She continuously dies and gets reborn, and though the series ended without resolution, we imagine she continues as a resilient character in this illusory universe of Westworld.

The Good Girl

One of the most dramatic turnarounds from the idea of the compliant, passive sex doll and robo-prostitute appears in the powerhouse 2013 play ironically titled The Good Girl by Australian playwright Emilie Collyer. The play’s robo-prostitute is retooled to combat boredom—with lethal consequences.

Collyer, a playwright, poet, and short story writer, won the Melbourne Fringe Festival’s Best Emerging Writer Award in 2013 when the play was presented as part of the festival. In the play, an electronic, silicone-skinned robo-prostitute is capable of mirroring sad, explosive, and even murderous human emotions. In the space of only fifty minutes, Collyer’s drama is both explosive and subtle. It deftly unites sex and violence, vulnerability and brutality, tender kisses as well as sexual assault.

The Good Girl is set in an urban brothel of the future where Anjali is a madam supervising a robot prostitute whose orgasmic outbursts (voiced by an actress) can sometimes be heard coming from an offstage bedroom. The play’s second character, Ven, is Anjali’s husband and the robot’s maintenance man, whose power tool is a drill. (The play also has plenty of jokes about his bodily masculine tool.)

Ven comes to fix the sexbot, which is malfunctioning—she cries sadly, which she’s not supposed to do—but the robot’s emotions turn out to be a projection of Anjali’s own responses to a television program about children with disabilities. The play is partially a cautionary tale about the dangerous technologies we create, but the real focus is on the very raw feelings and dueling relationship of the married couple, as well as the lethal wishes of the robot’s clients.

Much of the play is a wary sexual dance between Anjali and Ven—they come closer, then tensely break away. Both wife and husband see each other through a rosy lens: To Ven, Anjali looks like a version of the perfect woman, an idealized mother figure making a cake, and she even lets him lick chocolate batter from the mixer. To Anjali, Ven looks like the perfect man, with added features—a “poet-carpenter,” a mechanic social worker, a gourmet chef. Soon, however, they both discover the rages they have within them—rages mirrored in the brothel’s clients and the robot doll.

But it is the clients who pose the biggest problem in the brothel. In many sci-fi tales about men interacting with robot women, the men like facsimile females because they are soothing and fulfill all their desires. But in The Good Girl, some of the male clients want more than mere pleasurable sex dolls that can only show perpetual ecstasy and happiness. Ven says Anjali’s brothel patrons like the fact that the sex robot cries—it suggests she has a human element. For these men, it is the doll’s vulnerability that becomes the vehicle for them to act out their own rage and violence.

There is also an even bigger change: Ven also tells Anjali that the male clients now want “the taboos.” Men who are “regular, ordinary guys,” who used to be happy with women who were submissive and sweet, now find that boring and want something more.

One male client will even pay good money to have the sex robot all to himself for six months. He also wants to escalate her reactions so that client and robo-prostitute will engage in possessiveness, jealousy, paranoia, and rage—as Anjali says, like relationships “used to be.” Robot emotions in fiction are often programmed or learned directly from humans. In The Good Girl, to make the female robot feel terror, she’ll have to believe she really feels it—and she’ll have to learn this emotion from Anjali. Says Ven: “It has to come from you.”

The client also has a special request: he wants the robot to be a throwback to an earlier female stereotype—“a nagging domestic housewife” who has some of Anjali’s own pickiness. Under pressure from emporiums that are selling cheap copies of robots, Anjali, who wants to deal with the competition and make money, goes along with the plan to experience fear, rage, and terror—and impart these feelings to the robot.

The plan has terrible consequences. After starting with a kiss, Ven attacks Anjali in a sex game, and we hear her scream with fear, which turns to rage. The robo-prostitute herself becomes a “rogue sexbot” as she is attacked and in retaliation, creates her own carnage by murdering several clients and tearing their bodies apart.

After the violence, near the play’s end, Ven and Anjali venture out of their sheltered, isolated world, taking the errant sexbot with them to help save it from destruction. The robot—like so many errant sex robots in films and fiction that are neutralized and rendered safe—will be disassembled and her memory wiped clean. This is a resilient sexbot, however, that may yet live on. Though she’s just a robot, as Anjali says, she did fight for her life, and at some point they will try to reassemble and bring her back, as it were, to life.

When Anjali and Ven finally and cautiously venture outside with their sex robot, there’s a glimmer of hope that even with all of its violent and vengeful erotic impulses, humanity itself may somehow survive.

Collyer’s deeply unsettling tale is ultimately a drama about assemblage and deconstruction, and the play has elements of surrealist art. The marriage between Ven and Anjali looks like the ideal pairing of a couple happy with their conventional gender roles: she the happy housewife cook, he the repairer and mechanic with a poetic soul. The sexbot is assembled as an artifact designed to please, but there is an element of breakdown when she begins to cry.

The disturbing aspects of a doll as assemblage was seen in artist Hans Bellmer’s dolls made of flax fiber, covered with plaster of paris, with ball joints to make them easily manipulable. For his photographs, he pulled the doll apart and reassembled the sections of the torso in contorted, sometimes grotesque reconfigurations. Bellmer’s work reveals his fetishism with females, and in some of the photos, the doll with her glass eyes and coy gaze has the look of allure. But the photos are also saturated with sadism, for this is a female doll that can be torn apart and subjected to control.

Surrealistic photographs and paintings historically have often been filled with human fragments—armless torsos, disembodied heads—and are in part a resistance to reality, an act of protest, an evocation of the world of dream. The artist/photographer is the assembler and disassembler, the mastermind behind this world of fantasy and dream.

But Collyer’s play and films like Ex Machina have some of this aspect of surrealism with a difference: the doll/mannequin/fembot has agency. Even when Ava in Ex Machina has her arm torn off, she reassembles herself by taking a part from a lifeless female robot shell hanging on the wall. The Good Girl, too, has some of this surrealistic element with its disembodied offstage voice and reported nightmarish mayhem when the doll is attacked and mutilated. But Collyer as playwright rescripts the story: her robo-prostitute has agency, however horrific it is, when she tears her client apart. But for all her play’s bleak evocations of fragmentation, Collyer ultimately conjures up the possibility that the sexbot and humanity itself will once again reassemble and revive.

SEX DOLLS, ROBO-PROSTITUTES—ENDURING CONCEPTIONS AND WHAT LIES AHEAD

In films, television, novels, and plays, sex dolls and robo-prostitutes present a startling range. They are capable of being both pleasurable and lethal, comforting and catastrophically dangerous, highlighting two important directions these robotic pleasure dolls might take. The fears, like those of Victor Frankenstein with his rogue Creature, are always there, and there are those who fret that silicone sex dolls—like the violent prostitute in The Good Girl or the murderous doll in an early Twilight Zone episode—might suddenly become homicidal. Some writers scoff at the idea that sex dolls—designed for pleasure and comfort—could ever actually go astray and become violent creatures. The dolls are nowhere near this stage of development, and there are also too many controls and filters for this to happen, so the argument goes.

Given the state of today’s technology, commercial sex dolls and sex dolls used as robo-prostitutes probably won’t become dangerously autonomous—at least not yet! But in the world of fiction, at least, fears of rogue robots running amok are always there, and are recurring themes in cautionary tales that remind us not to become too complacent with the artificial humans we create.

For all of the fears, sex dolls seem to fill what Kate Devlin aptly calls a “niche market” rather than posing a social threat. Still, there is something deeply troubling about the fact that the age-old conceptualization of women as dolls seems to be doggedly persistent—even in our era when women themselves are roboticists, engineers, computer engineers, space scientists, and astronauts who have seemingly left behind the old, stifling gendered stereotypes. Hypersexualized sex dolls that embody so many of the old stereotypes may evolve into other forms of sex toys, but in the meantime, they are reminders of how hard it is cast off some men’s old fantasies of the doting, compliant woman whose sole purpose is to provide geisha-like pleasure. As AI-enabled sex dolls become ever more technologically sophisticated, many of the old female paradigms including the witless female unfortunately persist, even as women themselves are increasingly entering STEM fields, including working as robotics engineers. The question remains: If women get more involved in designing sex robots—male or female—will they make modifications that can resist casting dolls in the old stereotyped terms?

Perhaps, as Hallie Lieberman has written in “In Defense of Sex Robots,” some important changes can be made. “In fact, sex robots could be programmed to do the opposite of what we fear: They could teach men (and women and gender nonbinary people) about consent and female sexual pleasure. Since sex robots are in their infancy, now is the time to start shaping them into the technology we want them to be, not the technology we fear.”³⁹ The only rub is the notion that in an ideal world, sex doll users would react well to dolls that demand consent. One can only hope—after all, voice-activated assistants like Amazon’s Alexa now rebuke improper requests. But the notion of a sex doll conjures up a pliable toy, and given the perpetual human quest for control, that is a hard impulse to shake.

NOTES

1. See Marquard Smith, The Erotic Doll: A Modern Fetish (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 222.

2. Bo Ruberg, Sex Dolls at Sea: Imagined Histories of Sexual Doll Technologies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022), 2, 140, 149, 150, 154, 171, 307–08.

3. Edmond de Goncourt et al. (text) and Jean-François Raffaëlli (drawings), Les Types de Paris, Edition du Figaro (Paris: E. Plon, Nourrit et Cie, 1889).

4. Variations on the Coochie-Coochie and Hoochie-Coochie dances included Kutchy Kutchy, which appeared in sheet music as early as the 1860s.

5. Matt McMullen, telephone interview with Julie Wosk, December 6, 2017. All 2017 interviews refer to this date.

6. Christopher Trout, “There’s a New Sex Robot in Town: Say Hello to Solana,” engadget, January 10, 2018, https://www.engadget.com/2018-01-10-there-s-a-new-sex-robot-in-town-say-hello-to-solana.html.

7. RealDoll, accessed February 9, 2022, https://www.realdoll.com/realdoll-x/; RealGirl website, realgirlapp.com/faq/; Kate Devlin and Chloé Locatelli, “Guys and Dolls: Sex Robot Creators and Consumers,” in Maschinenliebe: Liebespuppen und Sexroboter aus technischer, psychologischer und philosophischer Perspektive, ed. Oliver Bendel (Wieaden: Springer and Gabler, 2020), 79–92.

8. AI-Tech, accessed July 26, 2023, https://ai-aitech.co.uk/emma-the-ai-robot.

9. Roxxxy doll websites and demonstrations on YouTube.com.

10. Matt McMullen, telephone interview with Julie Wosk, February 19, 2022. All 2022 interviews refer to this date.

11. McMullen interview with Wosk, 2017. See also Pam Kragen, “Harmony, the First AI Sex Robot,” San Diego Union-Tribune, September 12, 2017, YouTube video, 2:55, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CNLEfmx6Rk.

12. Guile Lindroth interview with Julie Wosk, 2017.

13. Lindroth interview with Wosk, 2017.

14. Matt McMullen, “Dawn of the Sexbots,” interview by George Gurley, Vanity Fair 57, no. 5 (May 2015), https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/2015/5/dawn-of-the-sexbots.

15. McMullen interviews with Wosk, 2017 and 2022.

16. McMullen interview with Wosk, 2022.

17. McMullen interview with Wosk, 2022.

18. McMullen, Vanity Fair, interview, 2015.

19. Julie Wosk, Playboy, Mad Men, and Me—And Other Stories ( KDP, 2020).

20. McMullen interview with Wosk, 2017.

21. Milo [Milo Yiannopoulos], “Sexbots: Why Women Should Panic,” Breitbart, September 16, 2015, https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2015/09/16/sexbots-why-women-should-panic/.

22. Heller first wrote Dummy as a pilot for a television series, rewrote the script for a movie, and then split the film into ten short episodes of ten minutes or less for each one—a format required by the short-lived Quibi film programming platform in 2020.

23. “Anna Kendrick Talking about Dummy on @Quibi’s Instagram Live,” April 21, 2020, YouTube video, 17:25, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l66oUfvyUak.

24. For a discussion of British caricatures of robotic humans see Julie Wosk, Breaking Frame: Technology and the Visual Arts in the Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992).

25. See Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995) for a discussion of gender and nineteenth-century standardization.

26. J. K. Huysmans, À rebours [Against the Grain], trans. Anonymous (1884); Wikisource, Dec. 12, 2022, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Against_the_Grain/Chapter_XIII.

27. J. K. Huysmans, À rebours [Against the Grain], trans. John Howard (1884); New York: Dover Publications, 1969, 84, 162. See translation and comments in Angus McLaren, Reproduction by Design: Sex, Robots, Trees, and Test-Tube Babies in Interwar Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 69, endnotes 90–91.

28. LumiDolls, accessed January 1, 2019; August 30, 2020; and April 23, 2022, https://www.lumidolls.com/en/lumidolls; See also Marie Papenfuss, “Hello, Westworld: Sex Doll Brothel Opens in Barcelona,” HuffPost, March 2, 2017, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sex-doll-barcelona-brothel_n_58b8ad10e4b0d2821b4cddb8.

29. LumiDolls, accessed April 23, 2022, https://lumidolls.com/en/lumidolls.

30. “Russia’s Second Sex Dolls Brothel Opens in St. Petersburg,” Russia Business Today, June 6, 2019, https://russiabusinesstoday.com/technology/russias-second-sex-dolls-brothel-opens-in-st-petersburg/.

31. Mark Hay, “Sex Doll Brothels Expand the Market for Synthetic Partners,” Forbes, October 31, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/markhay/2018/10/31/sex-doll-brothels-expand-the-market-for-synthetic-partners/.

32. Kathleen Richardson, “The Asymmetrical ‘Relationship’: Parallels between Prostitution and the Development of Sex Robots,” ACM SIGCAS Computers and Society 45, no. 3 (September 2015): 290–93, https://doi.org/10.1145/2874239.2874281; Kathleen Richardson, “The End of Sex Robots: Porn Robots and Representational Technologies of Women and Girls,” in Man-Made Women: The Sexual Politics of Sex Dolls and Sex Robots, ed. Kathleen Richardson and Charlotta Odlind (Palgrave MacMillan Cham, 2022), 171–92.

33. NMN, “What’s the Problem with Sex Dolls? A Conversation with Kathleen Richardson,” Nordic Model Now!, May 23, 2020, https://www.nordicmodelnow.org/2020/05/23/whats-the-problem-with-sex-dolls-a-conversation-with-kathleen-richardson/.

34. Reported in David Moye, “Sex Robot Molested at Electronics Festival, Creators Say,” Huffpost, September 29, 2017. Festival organizers later denied these reports.

35. Ian McEwan, Machines like Me: And People Like You (New York: Anchor Books, 2020), 260.

36. Kate Devlin, Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots (London: Bloomsbury Sigma, 2018), 266–67.

37. Julie Wosk, Women and the Machine: Representations from the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

38. In a later season, however, Niska, who was about to knife a man, pulls back when he refers to his daughter.

39. Hallie Lieberman, “In Defense of Sex Robots,” Quartz, March 2, 2018, https://qz.com/1215360/in-defense-of-sex-robots/.